Mary Gaitskill’s ‘The Mare’

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By Stacey D’Erasmo

Nov. 25, 2015

Desire and damage have long intertwined, an inseparable couple, in the work of Mary Gaitskill. With her first collection of stories in 1988, “Bad Behavior,” Gaitskill staked out her territory: love, or something, among the ruins — the ruins of self, the ruins of hope, the ruins created by cruelty, both literal and psychological. In Gaitskill’s work, people hurt one another for fun, for spite, inadvertently, because they can, and (as she titled a later collection) because they wanted to. In one of Gaitskill’s most famous stories, “Secretary,” which later became a film of the same name, an alienated young woman is sexually used by her boss, but finds the encounter has an array of effects. She is simultaneously dissociated, disgusted, turned on, depressed, oddly loyal to the boss and somehow liberated. It is not right, and it also awakens something vital in her. Gaitskill’s story doesn’t prioritize one emotion over any others or draw any moral conclusions. As she wrote in a 1994 Harper’s essay, “On Not Being a Victim,” “pain can be an experience that defies codification.” In that story, as in much of Gaitskill’s work, the heroine’s ability to remain aware of all uncodifiable experience, to turn it over and examine it, is how she stays alive.

The response to Gaitskill’s work, however, often throws around coded terms like “sadomasochistic” and “taboo themes” and “bad girls,” without pausing to ask what these terms actually mean or whose labels they are. In the film version, the secretary and her boss realize they are in love, marry and presumably live happily ever after. How difficult it can be to see ambiguity even when it is presented with as much clarity, vividness, humor, insight, tenderness and power as it is by Gaitskill. When women, sex and pain are involved, the world resists opening that space at all. If a woman’s darker emotions, experiences and desires don’t resolve into true love and marriage, she probably “really” wants to die, or should. “Bad girls” don’t have lives, just fates for which they are still expected to repent, not least in fiction. Cue discussions of “likability.”

Gaitskill, however, over the brilliant course of three story collections and three novels, begs to differ. Ambiguity — the inseparability of light and darkness, love and pain, nurture and destruction, progress and regress — is her métier, as is a quality I might call “embodied vision.” The question she seems to ask again and again, and with astonishing force in her latest novel, “The Mare,” is how to feel, how we do feel, not only in spite of damage but also because of it, how emotional or physical collision with other beings is, in fact, the only way to wake up and become fully alive. If there is an ethics to be teased out of Gaitskill’s complex oeuvre, it might be that the only soul-killing mistake a person can make is collapsing into numb self-­enclosure. Toward the end of her 2005 masterpiece, “Veronica,” the heroine narrowly avoids a lifetime of numbness via her passionate friendship with an awkward woman with whom she once worked in an office. Recalling her former life as a glamorous “demon” (she was a model), the heroine says: “I was saved by another demon, who looked on me with pity and so became human again. And because I pitied her in turn, I was allowed to become human, too.” This becoming, and staying, human in a world that can be so exploitative and brutal is the challenge Gaitskill sets her characters, particularly the women and girls. One technology for remaining human, neither numb demon nor shattered victim, is a form of empathic recognition for which “pity” is only one word.

That necessary empathic exchange includes the flora and fauna of the natural world. In “The Mare,” this is represented by horses, and one horse in particular, a difficult, previously abused one everyone calls Fugly Girl. The novel tells the story of what happens when Velveteen ­Vargas, an 11-year-old Dominican girl living in Brooklyn with her mother and brother, is sent by the Fresh Air Fund to stay for two weeks with Ginger and Paul, an artsy, ­middle-class white couple in upstate New York. Velveteen is immediately entranced by the stable near her host family, and especially by Fugly Girl, with whom she creates a life-changing connection. The two weeks becomes a relationship spanning three years between the two families, their respective communities and the horses. Velveteen discovers she is a gifted equestrienne, among other aspects of her growing self, as the adults around her discover layers in themselves and their relationships that are variously beautiful and terrible, loving and hateful, cruel and generous.

Gaitskill’s extraordinary, subtle rendering of the complex physical and spiritual pulse among these people tenuously yoked together by liberal ideals touches, obviously, on tricky questions of class and race. She pushes that edge by taking on not only Velvet’s point of view, but also her abusive mother’s, and by going deeply into Velvet’s world at home, her life at school, her growing interest in the boys in her neighborhood. Now and then, things get dodgy. While I could accept that Velvet’s mother, out of rage, internalized misogyny and a twisted form of protectiveness, beats her daughter and wildly favors her son — many parents in Gaitskill’s fiction abuse their children — I wasn’t sure why the white children in Ginger and Paul’s neighborhood were uniformly presented as unharmed, shining and whole. Their mothers sometimes get a little bitchy to Ginger, but that’s about it for trauma on the Hudson line, which seems unrealistic. Velveteen’s name also seems unlikely (although you can’t go broke overestimating what people will name their children, can you, Apple and Dweezil?), but also troublesome in that it burdens the girl with intertextuality by alluding to two children’s classics. No other character is framed in citations. But Gaitskill has created a young girl so alive, so three-dimensional, so entirely present in every line that she doesn’t need the footnoting. We feel her, just as she is. Ginger and Paul, meanwhile, suffer from what are commonly known as white people’s ­problems — they’re kind of bored with each other and themselves — and Gaitskill doesn’t spend much time on their petite anomie. It’s Velvet’s book, not Ginger’s and Paul’s; she is not an exotic, catalyzing stranger but the center of the story.

Indeed, all of the emotional electricity and hope here is in the triangle of Ginger, who is fighting to feel; Velvet, who is fighting for her life; and Fugly Girl, who kicks and bites her stall like a female fury, fighting with existence. While their impact on one another is mutually transformative, these three either have no idea how to talk to one another or can’t. More often than not, feelings are communicated, across cultures as well as across species, wordlessly. “She was smiling,” Velvet observes of Ginger when they meet, “but something else in her face was almost crying.” Brushing Velvet’s hair after the girl has a rough encounter with the more privileged girls at the stable, Ginger feels that “the hard, clean waves of her anger entered my body.” Velvet, watching Fugly Girl lash out at her stall, says, “She kicked harder, even more hating, and also something else, something I could feel coming out from my own body, coming hard.” And, later, also of Fugly Girl, “I felt the scars on her face like they were on me.” People, in this book, lie to one another and to themselves in what they say and do, but their bodies are exquisitely sensitive instruments for experiencing the true, secret, unnameable lives of others. Gaitskill puts raw faith, here, in the primal intimacy of a creatureliness that is common to all who live and breathe, regardless of species, race, gender, or class. Her trust in that commonality is breathtakingly vulnerable, among the greatest risks of her career. “I felt our minds pressed together,” Velvet says as she leads Fugly Girl out one night, “each feeling where the other was . . . except it kept moving and changing.” Ginger, greeting Velvet at the train station, says, “I knelt to hold her and I thought with my body, I love you.”

Gaitskill delivers this visceral moment, and others like it, with full knowledge that embraces can be rough, and the people offering them are nearly always flawed, vulnerable and scarred. And yet, she insists in this magnificently hopeful novel. And yet.